Uncle Snedeker stopped with the hammer raised and looked down. “Eh, just a minute, Effie. Just till I pound this nail.” He brought the hammer down and said: “Ouch!” and stuck his thumb in his mouth. Then he took it out and looked at it. “Pounded the wrong nail that time,” he said. “Eh, Effie—you get that? Hit the thumbnail instead of the shingle nail. Get it?”
“Come down here,” she commanded.
“’Taint everybody that could make a joke when he’d just hit his thumb,” grumbled Uncle Snedeker. “Good joke, too. Eh, well, what is it?”
She handed him the note. “‘Admirer,’ eh?” he said when he had read it.
“Yes,” said Aunt Effie, trying not to look pleased. “An admirer,” she repeated, looking over his shoulder. “Now I wonder who that could be?”
“I can’t imagine,” said Uncle Snedeker.
She straightened up. “Oh, you can’t,” she said sarcastically. “You find it strange that anybody should admire me, do you? I guess there are plenty of people back in Orenville that admire me. I guess nobody gives any better teaparties than I do, do they?”
“No, no, Effie,” protested Uncle Snedeker. “Eh, gosh, all I meant was that there ain’t anybody around here that knows you. Soon as they know you they admire you. But we haven’t met anybody but the sheriff. Maybe it’s the sheriff.”
“I suppose it must be,” said Aunt Effie thoughtfully. “Such a nice man, too, except for that foolishness about talking animals. I must ask him to tea. Dear me ‘an admirer’! How courtly of him!” She twittered and blushed, and then she stiffened her back and said: “Anyway, Snedeker, you’ll have to mow that meadow.”
“Me?” exclaimed Uncle Snedeker. “I don’t know any more about mowing machines than I do about fancy work. You’ve got the teapot now, Effie. Why don’t we go back home?”
“Not while there are things that need attention. I’m not going to have William Bean saying that I neglected his place while I was here. You’ll have to cut that hay.”
“Cut my leg off, like as not,” grumbled Uncle Snedeker.
“Cut ’em both off if you want to. But you’ll mow it, legs or no legs. And when you go down that way,” she added, “deliver this postcard at the pigpen.”
“At the what?” demanded Uncle Snedeker, looking at the card. “Why, shine my Sunday shoes! She’s written a postcard to a pig!”
“Yes,” said Aunt Effie. “It beats all how silly some people can act. I felt sort of bad, taking that teapot away from her, even though it should have come to me, but not now, I don’t. Why, she isn’t worthy of having a fine silver teapot like that.”
“But what do you want it delivered for, eh? ’Tisn’t any use to a pig.”
“Maybe not,” said Aunt Effie. “But even though it’s kind of silly, you take it down. It isn’t for us to inquire whether the pig can read it or not.”
So on his way over to the shed where the mowing machine was kept, Uncle Snedeker stopped at the pigpen. He started to knock on the door, and then hesitated. “Darned if I’ll knock on any pig’s door,” he said, and stuffed the card in the crack and went on.
In the meantime, Jinx and Little Weedly had had a very successful morning. They had called on the ducks and the dogs; on Charles and Henrietta, and on John, the fox, who had a summer home in the orchard. Everywhere the animals had played up, and pretended to be terrified at the sight of Weedly; and as a result the pig had already lost a lot of his timidity. He no longer pressed tight against Jinx as they walked along. His manner at times was almost cocky. Jinx was very much pleased.
As they came back from the orchard, they had to cross a corner of the upper meadow. Uncle Snedeker had managed to hitch Hank to the mowing machine, and was just making his first cut along the stone wall. He was coming right towards them.
Little Weedly was getting over his fear of other animals, but a man on a mowing machine was something different. He gave a squeal and ducked down into the long grass.
“Come out of there, Weedly,” called Jinx. “You’re right in the path of the machine. Get up on the wall till he gets by.”
But Weedly wasn’t going to come out where he could be seen. He began to crawl through the grass away from the machine.
Uncle Snedeker was jouncing along on the iron seat, holding the reins in one hand, and hanging onto his hat, which kept sliding down over his nose, with the other. The mowing machine kept up a pleasant clatter, but noises are only pleasant when you are used to them, and it didn’t seem pleasant to Uncle Snedeker. He wasn’t used to cutting hay, and to him it sounded like the snip-snip of dozens of hungry little pairs of scissors, only waiting until he finally lost his balance and fell off, to chop him into mincemeat. He wasn’t used to farms or farming, either, and his eyes kept roaming back and forth across the fields and the edge of the woods, for he didn’t know what strange animals might suddenly leap out at him. Wolves, perhaps, or even Indians.
And then he caught sight of the ripple in the grass that Little Weedly made as he crawled along on his stomach.
“Whoa!” said Uncle Snedeker, and when Hank stopped, he bent forward and looked at the ripple under the flat of his hand, as he had seen cowboys do in the movies. “Eh, that’s the way they come,” he muttered, “with a tomahawk in one hand, and a bow in the other. And then when they get close enough, up they jump with a whoop—”
… he bent forward and looked at the ripple...
Just at that minute Weedly stepped on a hoptoad. The toad made a sound which would probably be spelled as something like “unkh!” Weedly made a sound, too, as he jumped up, but it isn’t one that anybody could possibly spell. It was one of his biggest and best squeals. And Uncle Snedeker gave a yell, and jumped down from the mowing machine, and ran for his life toward the house.
Chapter 6
Uncle Snedeker was usually considered to be a pretty good husband. That is, he almost always did what Aunt Effie told him to. But once in a while he got stubborn, and then she couldn’t do anything with him. This was one of the times. He refused absolutely to go out again into the meadow. So after arguing with him for a while, Aunt Effie went out to mow the hay herself.
Aunt Effie had her own ideas of what was right and proper. On her tenth birthday, her mother had given her an etiquette book, and all her life she had done what the etiquette book said was the correct thing to do. So it can’t be denied that she had good manners. But of course her tenth birthday was a long time ago, and the manners she got from the etiquette book were rather old-fashioned. She would no more have thought of going out of the house without a hat and coat on than you would think of eating soup with a fork. So when she went up and climbed into the seat of the mowing machine, she had on her second-best bonnet and shawl.
Hank’s manners weren’t very polished, but he was polite, and although he turned around and looked at her several times, he didn’t laugh. And he walked along very slowly and carefully, so that she shouldn’t fall off.
So that morning Aunt Effie mowed the whole of the upper meadow, and after she had had her dinner, she hitched Hank to the rake and raked all the hay into heaps and left it there to dry in the hot sun. And then she had supper, and changed to her best bonnet and shawl, and told Uncle Snedeker that he could drive her down to Centerboro to the movies. “I’ve worked hard all day,” she said, “and I need a little relaxation.”
Freddy had been working hard all that day, too. When Mrs. Wiggins had put her hoof over her heart and pretended to be frightened, it had given him an idea. He thought he would write a play. He thought it would be a good play with Mrs. Wiggins as the heroine, and it would be exciting, and most of the other animals would have parts. And when he had it written, they could give it in the barn. Only he didn’t know what the play would be about.
It is pretty hard to write a play if you don’t know what it is about, and so all Freddy had written down on the sheet of paper in his typewriter was:
A PLAY
by
FREDDY
Act I.
He was still sitting in front of the typewriter at three o’clock, when Jinx and Little Weedly stopped in. Most people are not as much afraid of their relatives as of strangers, and Weedly walked right in without trembling, and he hardly blushed at all when he said: “Good afternoon, Cousin Frederick.”
“I hope we’re not disturbing you,” said Jinx with a grin. “If we are, just say so, and we’ll keep right on doing it.”
“Well, as a matter of fact,” said Freddy, “I’ve been working hard all day, and I’m glad to rest a little.”
“I should think you would be,” said Jinx, looking over his shoulder. “Do you mean to tell me that you’ve done all that today?”
“There’s more to writing a play than just putting it down on paper,” protested Freddy. “I want to write one that you can all have parts in—you and Mrs. Wiggins and Hank and Charles and Robert and all the rest of us.”
“That would be fun,” said the cat. “But why write one? Why don’t we put on one that’s already written? You’ve got a whole book of plays here by that what’s-his-name—the fellow you always claim wrote the best plays that ever were written?”
“Oh, you mean Shakespeare,” said Freddy, who was a great reader of the works of that author. “Well, we could, but I thought it would be more fun to write and put on our own play, all by ourselves. Then, you see, everybody could act out a character that he liked. Now me, for instance; I’ve done a lot of detective work, and I could be Sherlock Holmes. And you could be—”
“A G-man,” interrupted Jinx. “Sure, that’s a great idea. And look here, Freddy, why don’t you let everybody choose a character they’d like to be, and then you write a play about them?”
“Gosh, Jinx, I think you’ve got something there! Yes, sir, you certainly have. It’ll be kind of mixed up, because some of the characters will be modern, and some will be a couple of hundred years old. You know who Mrs. Wiggins will want to be—Queen Elizabeth. But I guess we can work it. Let’s see—how about you, Weedly? Who do you want to be?”
But Little Weedly had curled up in a corner and gone to sleep.
“Golly, I hope he isn’t going to be like his father,” said Jinx. “Just a yawn on four legs, that Ernest. But I guess it’s because he didn’t get much sleep last night. Anyway, I don’t believe we’d ever get him to act.”
“If he keeps on improving at the rate he has today, we could,” said Freddy.
“Yes, but he’s only met animals that pretended to be afraid of him today. I don’t know what will happen when he meets strangers. I thought maybe while he’s still feeling so sure of himself, I’d take him down to the movies in Centerboro tonight. What do you think?”
Most animals don’t have much use for pocket money, simply because they don’t have any pockets. When they find pennies and dimes and nickels—and they find more than you would believe—they haven’t any place to save them up. But when Freddy had founded the First Animal Bank of Centerboro, all this changed. By the time the bank had been running a year, nearly all the Bean animals had nice little bank accounts.
Of course they didn’t have as much use for money as boys and girls have, because Mr. Bean got them everything they needed. But they did like to go to the movies, and so now they could go when they wanted to. Mr. Muszkiski, who ran the Grand Palace Motion Picture Theatre in Centerboro, liked to have them come, too, because a pig and a horse and a couple of squirrels in the audience is an added attraction to any film, and a great many people came just to see the animals. So animals were only charged half price, which was ten cents.
Freddy wasn’t sure whether it would be wise to take Little Weedly to the movies or not. “If the people crowd around and stare and laugh, as they do sometimes,” he said, “it may scare him again, and then he’ll be bashful all the rest of his life.—But wait a minute! I know what we can do.”
He rummaged around in the heaps of old newspapers and magazines on his desk, and found a stick of black grease paint that he had used in disguising himself when he had been doing detective work. Then he very cautiously knelt down in front of Little Weedly and painted a big black moustache and heavy black eyebrows on the sleeper’s face.
“That ought to scare ’em,” he said.
“Golly, doesn’t he look fierce!” said Jinx, and began to giggle.
“Wait till the sheriff sees him,” said Freddy. “He’ll arrest him on sight.” And he began to giggle too.
They giggled so hard finally that Weedly woke up and asked them what they were laughing at.
“Oh, nothing,” said Jinx, “nothing. Just something your Cousin Frederick thought of. By the way, Freddy, I’ll have to draw some money out of the First Animal for movie tickets.”
“The bank’s open this afternoon,” said Freddy. “I’m going down there now.”
So they walked down to the bank, which was in an old shed at the side of the road. There was no door on the bank but none was needed, for all the money and valuables were kept in the underground vaults which the woodchucks and John, the fox, had dug. The opening to the vaults was covered with an old plank, which was guarded night and day by two squirrels.
As Freddy came in, the squirrels got up from the plank, on which they had been sitting, and said respectfully: “Good morning, Mr. President.”
“Good morning, boys, good morning,” said Freddy affably. He went back of the long counter, put on a pair of spectacles which made him look very responsible and bank presidentish, and opened a large book.
“Let me see,” he said, “let me see. Jinx, Jinx, Jinx—ah, here it is. According to our books, Jinx, you have a balance of exactly forty-six cents, two bunches of dried catnip, and a rubber mouse. In that case I think we can let you have twenty cents—yes, I think we can. Boys—” he turned to the squirrels—“go down and get twenty cents for Mr. Jinx. And at the same time, bring up a dime for me.”
The squirrels tugged the plank aside and dove down the hole.
“Why did you say good morning, Freddy?” asked Jinx. “It’s nearly four o’clock.”
“Well, you see,” said the pig, “the bank’s really supposed to be open mornings, but I’m so busy that I seldom get down until afternoon. It doesn’t make any difference really. But if someone was to complain about it, I’d just turn to the squirrels and say: ‘What do I always say to you boys when I come in?’ And they’d say: ‘Why, you always say good morning.’ And then whoever complained wouldn’t have any comeback to that.”
“But they know you’re not here mornings, Cousin Frederick,” said Weedly.
“What you know, and what you can prove, are two very different things,” Freddy said.
“Yes,” said Little Weedly, “but—”
“Don’t argue with him, Weedly,” said Jinx. “Why, talk about proving things: he can prove that the moon is made of green cheese. He could even prove that you had a long black moustache, if he wanted to.”
“I guess you couldn’t prove that very well, Cousin Frederick,” said Weedly, laughing.
“Well, I’m not going to try, not right now anyway,” Freddy answered. “And here are the boys with the money. Run along now; I must enter these transactions in the book. See you at the show.”
When they had gone, Freddy wrote for a while. Then he said to the squirrels: “You boys can take a little nap if you want to. I’ll be here, and I’ll see that no burglars get in.” So the squirrels curled up and went to sleep, and Freddy, after watching them closely for a few minutes, put his head down on the counter and went to sleep too.
If any burglars had come, they could have cleaned out that bank—lock, stock and barrel—capital, resources and personnel. Only of course they would have had to be small enough burglars to get down into the vaults, and the only burglars Freddy had ever seen were much too large, so he felt perfectly safe.
By and by he woke up, and he thought for a while about plans for keeping Aunt Effie on the farm until they could get back the teapot, and then he thought about his play. And t
hen he woke up the watchmen and went back home to supper. When he got there, he found that he still had on his spectacles.
The spectacles just had windowglass in them and were only for show. He never wore them anywhere but in the bank. “If I keep them around here, they’ll get lost,” he thought. “I’ll wear them to the movies, and stop in and leave them at the bank when I come home.” So after supper he started out.
It was a midsummer evening, and the sun was close to setting as he trudged down the dusty road to Centerboro. Under the roadside maples it was beginning to get dark, and indeed, after the first mile, it seemed to be getting dark much more quickly than usual. One or two cars passed him, nearly choking him with dust, and then a big gravel truck thundered past. When the dust from that had drifted away, the sky seemed suddenly to have become overcast. “Going to have a storm,” he thought, and trotted along faster. More cars passed him, bound for Centerboro and the movies; it was getting so dark that he could hardly see the road. And then from ahead a voice hailed him.
“Hello, Freddy.”
Freddy peered around, but could make out nothing in the gloom. “Who is it?” he said. “It’s so dark I can’t see you.”
“Dark!” said the voice. “What are you talking about? It’s me—Jinx.”
“Oh,” said Freddy. “Well, I guess we shouldn’t have started for the movies. There’s going to be a terrible storm. Did you ever know it to get dark so quick? Let’s not waste any time; maybe we can get there before it begins to rain.”
Jinx began to laugh, and Freddy heard Little Weedly snicker. “I don’t see what’s so funny—” he began.
“That’s just it,” said Jinx. “You can’t see anything. Well, you know I can see in the dark pretty well. Just catch hold of my tail and I’ll lead you.”
“I guess I’ll have to,” said Freddy. “I can’t see a thing now. But I don’t see what you’re laughing at.”
“Just a little joke we had,” said Jinx. “Catch hold.”
Freddy’s Cousin Weedly Page 5
